In this week’s episode, we get up close and personal with music. Ryan and Jacqui, who both studied music, trade stories about playing digital upright pianos and evaluate the quality of their sound. We also discuss iPad apps used for music making and performance. Not all of us compose or play music as trained musicians, though. Cesar recommends apps for amateur music production and creation. We also discuss our favorite ways of listening to music, finding recommendations online, and the fine art of playlist composition. As a counterpoint, Ryan reminds us how satisfying it can be to listen to an album in its entirety.

Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng is joined by Open Source Editor Ryan Paul, Social Editor Cesar Torres, and Ars Contributor Casey Johnston. This time around, we’re also including links to a Spotify playlist that features music and artists we mentioned on the show. What hardware and software do you use to meet your music needs? Maybe you have other music to recommend to us. Share your favorites with us in the comments.

Promoted Comments

Garageband is an excellent musical notepad - particularly for multi-tracking.

As a guitarist for the last 25 or so years, I've been a long time stickler for a fully analogue signal path until recently.

With the huge advance in mobile processing power and my exploration into ERG (extended range guitars), I've had to explore other options: The traditional amp->cabinet->mic setup is simply incapable of accurately rendering the range of a guitar with more than seven strings without sounding horrible and farty (I have both a low B and a lower F#). As a result, I've started using an Apogee Jam into an iPhone 4/iPad 3 running ampKit as my preamp (based in part on the Ars review), and running it into the house system in live shows, and via a male-male 1/8" cable into my MacBook for demo recording.

The tone is really really good, and the convenience of being able to show up to a gig with my "amp" and instrument all in one case saves me a huge amount of time, both in setup and teardown.

88 posts | registered Jul 14, 2011

Cesar Torres
Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City. Emailcesar.torres@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Urraca

Can't listen. At work. But man I want to try Ableton Live. That said, with iOS out there are so many decent options for amateur musicians who just want to try sequencing stuff together at no cost.

- Camel Alchemy, there's both a free iOS version and a free player version for the Desktop. http://www.camelaudio.com/Alchemy.php- Korg iMS 20 is excellent, as long as you're familiar or want to learn semi-modular synthesis.- Korg iElectribe is also excellent and it's easy to use.- Native Instruments iMaschine is really fun if you like to sample and field record.- Propellerheads just released an app called Figure, which looks very promising and is 99 cents.

In fact I'd recommend anyone who's looking at audio explore the iOS ecosystem before throwing down a lot of money on a "real" audio program like Logic or Sonar or Cubase (or Ableton Live).

Regarding new music, overall it has a lack of musicianship, or indie rock which a lot of my friends like is really fruity to me. I do think Killer Mike's new album is outstanding, as are Aesop Rock and El-P's. Fiona Apple's is a really nice sort of jarring exercise even though there isn't much structure there. I like it a lot. Last year I thought PJ Harvey had another classic album.

Hardware setup at home, I use the PS3 networked with my home computer to play uncompressed CD audio through home theater speakers. Really happy with it, it's the reason I still haven't converted to MP3 fully (unless amazon has a really good sale or something).

The problem with albums imo is that super producers are no longer people who go in and craft an entire vision with people, and are more people who make individual tracks. A lot of classic rap albums for example had single producers or producer teams (Pete Rock, Bomb Squad, Dr. Dre, etc.) whereas now people like Lil Wayne will have 10-11 producers come in. Also while we get happy about the death of music industry labels, the reality is that they provided a lot of structure to guide artistic visions, and the loss is similar to what's happened to the news industry online with their lack of editors.

I am not a music producer of any kind. I don't have the rhythm or inclination required. Being unemployed (under-employed really, but semantics) as long as I have means I get to listen to music nearly constantly. I almost always have some music playing in the background, unless I feel like watching a movie or a show when I am at home.

I am also an EDM addict. Been this way since I was 8 or 9; of course I had not-so-good taste at the time, and even until I was about 17 or 18, had little idea of the 'good stuff' I am accustomed to now. Of the multitude of genres out there, I listen regularly to; trance, psytrance, electro-house, various forms of house, acid trance (the stuff before acid merged with jungle to become Drum'n'Bass), and DnB.

As for playlists, many of the tracks I listen to are 1 or 2 hours long. Being that they are almost always radio shows, rather than albums, or individual tracks. Downloading the shows are sometime facilitated by the artists themselves (J00F is one, in particular), though many have to be stream-ripped.

For nearly all of the shows I download, I also download a cue sheet, and have installed CUEPlayer for Winamp.

As for the shows and cues themselves, I have found that CueNation has quite a library and is constantly updated with new shows and their associated cues for EDM shows and sets.

I'm still looking for an app that will deliver the music I'm looking for in the car. I generally like top 40 stuff (pop, rap, whatever), but I don't want to hear the same stuff over and over like on the radio - I'd like to hear, say, top 100 stuff, from the past several years (or older). This has been hard to accomplish.

Pandora's and Slacker's stations are very limited and end up repeating music quickly. I tried Spotify's Radio feature with the Pop station and it randomly played some Michael Jackson from the 80s. Basically anything genre-based isn't going to work. I also don't want to create playlists by hand - I want to be surprised by new stuff that comes up.

I'm still looking for an app that will deliver the music I'm looking for in the car. I generally like top 40 stuff (pop, rap, whatever), but I don't want to hear the same stuff over and over like on the radio - I'd like to hear, say, top 100 stuff, from the past several years (or older). This has been hard to accomplish.

Pandora's and Slacker's stations are very limited and end up repeating music quickly. I tried Spotify's Radio feature with the Pop station and it randomly played some Michael Jackson from the 80s. Basically anything genre-based isn't going to work. I also don't want to create playlists by hand - I want to be surprised by new stuff that comes up.

And offline listening would be good too.

Can anything satisfy this?

So you don't want to use anything sorted by other people and you don't want to sort anything yourself? I like using my iPod with dynamically created playlists where you just specify a genre and a rating (5 star etc.) and it fills it for you. Then just play that on shuffle.

And re: Playlists: The only playlists I have are auto playlist for recent additions and top 25 played songs. I just listen to albums and very rarely, on shuffle. I choose what I want for that time and be done with it.

It's actually one of the reason why I went Windows Phone over iPhone. iTunes/iPhone has no concept of a "Now Playing" playlist where I can right-click/long hold something and go "add to Now Playing". If I want to queue up multiple unrelated albums and songs, I would have to make a playlist that I have to delete later because I will never use that playlist again. Or, I have to babysit the device as one album finishes to switch to the next one. That pissed me off a lot with my iPod. The problem gets worse when each single counts as an album! In Zune/Windows Phone, I can queue up completely unrelated tracks and off I go. No having to make playlists to manually delete later.

True, but you don't have to use iTunes at all with Rockbox. You can drag and drop, and it supports most standard playlists (m3u, pls, possibly others) so you can make them in most any media player, and drop those onto the iPod. I've done this with cue sheets, and a couple m3us before, not a hitch if the playlist is in the same folder as the music, though I imagine if you use a Playlist folder in the root of the drive, that might prove a tad problematic; absolute vs relative paths.....

Sounds good. But I opted for something that worked the way I wanted out of the box. I have no interest in hacking devices to get them to work my way. That's also why I didn't go Android. It was time to upgrade as I was getting cramped with the 8GB nano. Now I have a 40GB phone.

I used Winamp with my iPod for most of the time, so it wasn't so bad. I only had to suffer iTunes when Winamp didn't update for Windows 7 fast enough.

I'm still looking for an app that will deliver the music I'm looking for in the car. I generally like top 40 stuff (pop, rap, whatever), but I don't want to hear the same stuff over and over like on the radio - I'd like to hear, say, top 100 stuff, from the past several years (or older). This has been hard to accomplish.

Pandora's and Slacker's stations are very limited and end up repeating music quickly. I tried Spotify's Radio feature with the Pop station and it randomly played some Michael Jackson from the 80s. Basically anything genre-based isn't going to work. I also don't want to create playlists by hand - I want to be surprised by new stuff that comes up.

And offline listening would be good too.

Can anything satisfy this?

So you don't want to use anything sorted by other people and you don't want to sort anything yourself? I like using my iPod with dynamically created playlists where you just specify a genre and a rating (5 star etc.) and it fills it for you. Then just play that on shuffle.

I'm okay with lists sorted by other people (not sure who you mean), just not myself. For that same reason I don't want to play just local music - that means it will only play things I know I have and have probably heard. To be able to hear new stuff (as new stuff comes out, or old stuff that I forgot about), it needs to be a radio/station type app and not just local stuff.

Jacqui and Ryan, better mic please :/ The sound quality still feels very all over the place. Kind of funny about an episode on audio.

I gave up already. I've been complaining about the audio since the second podcast, and they don't seem to listen or respond about it. At least this episode was a little tighter and shorter, but better planning ahead of time would make it better overall. I got bored about 2/3 of the way through.

Jacqui and Ryan, better mic please :/ The sound quality still feels very all over the place. Kind of funny about an episode on audio.

I gave up already. I've been complaining about the audio since the second podcast, and they don't seem to listen or respond about it. At least this episode was a little tighter and shorter, but better planning ahead of time would make it better overall. I got bored about 2/3 of the way through.

It's not the content, so I wasn't bored. Jacqui sounds muffled and Ryan had some weird reverb at one point.

Jacqui and Ryan, better mic please :/ The sound quality still feels very all over the place. Kind of funny about an episode on audio.

I gave up already. I've been complaining about the audio since the second podcast, and they don't seem to listen or respond about it. At least this episode was a little tighter and shorter, but better planning ahead of time would make it better overall. I got bored about 2/3 of the way through.

It's not the content, so I wasn't bored. Jacqui sounds muffled and Ryan had some weird reverb at one point.

I mixed up two different complaints in my post. One was audio, the other was content. Content has been hit-or-miss for me (and others), but audio has been bad since day one.

I wanted a digital piano so I could play in private, but couldn't stand the sound of anything I tried. The problem isn't so apparent if you use a lot of pedal, but I don't. I ended up getting a hammer-action keyboard (most digital pianos now have those, so they feel kind of like real pianos) and this nifty bit of software:

Instead of sampling a real piano, this simulates a piano's sound by modelling it mathematically. The synthesised instrument ends up sounding very close to a real thing, if a little cold, perhaps (but then I'd say that about all modern pianos). What makes it special though is that it produces overtones! It also has a smoother gradation between notes, so as the volume increases from striking a note harder, the tone colour changes very smoothly. The end result is that you can get some subtle effects from the instrument, which are absent from sampled pianos (though to be fair I haven't tried the really expensive ones).

Oh, and it runs on Linux as well as Mac and Windows. Woo!

The irony of the whole thing is that I went back to playing my upright after a while, a Hanoverian instrument which is probably about a century old, and now find I can't really go back to the synthesised instrument any more. It just isn't the same. There appears to be a difference between hearing a loudspeaker or headphone diaphragm vibrate and hearing a piano-sized soundboard vibrating in front of you! There's that and I guess I also just like the sound that my old piano makes. Perhaps it lacks the kind of purity of sound of a more modern piano, but it has a warmth and colour that I rather like.

I wanted a digital piano so I could play in private, but couldn't stand the sound of anything I tried. The problem isn't so apparent if you use a lot of pedal, but I don't. I ended up getting a hammer-action keyboard (most digital pianos now have those, so they feel kind of like real pianos) and this nifty bit of software:

Instead of sampling a real piano, this simulates a piano's sound by modelling it mathematically. The synthesised instrument ends up sounding very close to a real thing, if a little cold, perhaps (but then I'd say that about all modern pianos). What makes it special though is that it produces overtones! It also has a smoother gradation between notes, so as the volume increases from striking a note harder, the tone colour changes very smoothly. The end result is that you can get some subtle effects from the instrument, which are absent from sampled pianos (though to be fair I haven't tried the really expensive ones).

Oh, and it runs on Linux as well as Mac and Windows. Woo!

The irony of the whole thing is that I went back to playing my upright after a while, a Hanoverian instrument which is probably about a century old, and now find I can't really go back to the synthesised instrument any more. It just isn't the same. There appears to be a difference between hearing a loudspeaker or headphone diaphragm vibrate and hearing a piano-sized soundboard vibrating in front of you! There's that and I guess I also just like the sound that my old piano makes. Perhaps it lacks the kind of purity of sound of a more modern piano, but it has a warmth and colour that I rather like.

Indeed. Pianoteq is an amazing piece of software and is better than any sample-based software. But it still falls short of real piano's. At its best it can only emulate a recording of a piano, not the sound of a live one. When playing with a trio, it doesn't give me the control and inspiration a real piano gets me. For a cover-band or something where the piano just hides somewhere in the mix it's fine I guess.

Some cheaper modern piano's tend to be a little stiff, but at the other end of the scale there are some truly great modern piano's. The art of building piano's is still advancing.

In the podcast the 'escapement' feature of some digital keyboards was mentioned. Escapement on digitals really is just a gimmick. Real piano's have it, but not because we *want* it; it isn't a feature you actually want in a piano. On digital piano's it's just a gimmick for the salespeople (and owners) to brag about.

For at home I'd advise a 'silent' piano, which are real piano's that can be silenced and used with headphones when you want. Or a Fender Rhodes; the original 'mobile piano'. New ones even have midi, so you can connect Pianoteq or Ivory.

Spotify radio allows you to create a radio station based on any artist or track you like. The genres are always going to be too generic. I have discovered some wonderful music through Spotify radio. My only gripe is that you can't reverse through the radio list, I get mesmerized by a song and then forget to give it the thumbs up before the next track starts. That said seriously Madonna and boyz II men ars?

It would have been nice if you created a version of the playlist, even just text, that didn't require Spotify. I'm sure Spotify is nice, but as long as it requires a Facebook account, I won't have anything to do with it. I can only guess at what kind of information they're hoping to gather out of the arrangement.

Garageband is an excellent musical notepad - particularly for multi-tracking.

As a guitarist for the last 25 or so years, I've been a long time stickler for a fully analogue signal path until recently.

With the huge advance in mobile processing power and my exploration into ERG (extended range guitars), I've had to explore other options: The traditional amp->cabinet->mic setup is simply incapable of accurately rendering the range of a guitar with more than seven strings without sounding horrible and farty (I have both a low B and a lower F#). As a result, I've started using an Apogee Jam into an iPhone 4/iPad 3 running ampKit as my preamp (based in part on the Ars review), and running it into the house system in live shows, and via a male-male 1/8" cable into my MacBook for demo recording.

The tone is really really good, and the convenience of being able to show up to a gig with my "amp" and instrument all in one case saves me a huge amount of time, both in setup and teardown.